Once upon a time, long ago, The Night Owl held a fun little contest where he cobbled together a ransom note-style message made up of different letters from various card fronts and your job was to match the letters with the card it was pulled from. Being a graphic designer who deals with fonts all day long as well as a card geek, this sounded right up my ally. Of course I ended up getting 2 wrong so I didn’t win, but the Night Owl, being the magnanimous guy that he is, went ahead and sent some consolation cards to all who made the attempt to crack the code. Furthermore, being the thoughtful guy that he is, he didn’t just pile together a bunch of random cards and send them my way. He actually took the time to scan through some of my want lists and sent me cards that I actually needed. My hats off to you, sir.

Let’s see a sampling.

Firstly, he knocked off a few more cards that I needed for several more recent Mets team sets. One kind of funny thing I’ve noticed about collecting (or at least my collecting) is that things happen in waves. Like a few months ago, it seemed that every card that fell into my grubby little hans was at least 30 years olds. The last 2 or 3 months on the other hand, I’ve been crossing cards off of my 90’s and 00’s wantlists hand over foot. Ahh, the cycle of life.

As happy as I am to get this card, it does make me a little sad. It makes me realize that I might’ve already witnessed Jose Reyes steal his last base while wearing a Mets uniform. Hopefully not, though.

This one also makes me a little sad just because regardless of whether Jose resigns with the Mets, I will certainly not be seeing him high fiving Carlos Beltran. Unless the Mets pull a Cliff Lee and resign Beltran during the off season, although comments already made by Sandy Alderson would lead me to believe not.

At least I’ll get to see one more year of David and his high socks that he wears only during day games. Weirdo.

And I’ll also get to see a couple of more seasons of the Irish Hammer mashing opposing pitching and booting balls. Actually, I personally don’t think Murph is as bad as people make him out be defensively. He’s not great, but I don’t think he’s that bad. It’s not like he plays for the Marlins.

Aside from those Mets need, T.N.O. also sent along some other set needs. Honestly, I had gotten so focused on my Mets and 1960 Topps pursuits that I had forgotten that I even posted those wantlists, but now they’re a little shorter.

Owl sent along a small stack of these Legendary Lineage cards, but I chose this one because all the others had at least 1 Yankees on it.

Torii Hunter has really had a couple of down years hasn’t he? The last few years worth of his Allen & Ginter cards are just plain pedestrian.

I almost can’t believe that I haven’t obtained one Allen & Ginter card from this years set. Although I still think Ginter is one of the cooler sets to come out every year, my collecting philosophy has just changed to the point where I don’t feel the need to buy any. I think I might make a run at collecting all the Negro League players from all the different sets. I think these are some of the coolest cards every year.

Also included in the package were a couple of oldies but goodies.

For a Mets fan, it doesn’t get much cooler than a 1986 food issue Doc Gooden. A friend of mine just met Doc yesterday or the day before as a matter of fact. He was doing a book signing at the store that he works at and got to hang out him for a little bit. Pretty awesome.

Finally, here’s the gem of the bunch.

Nothing could beat getting an old Dodgers card that you need from a set that you collect straight from the hands of a Dodgers fan. Awesome.

Thanks again, Owl for all the great cards and for holding that contest. As far as I can remember, it was a lot of fun. It was so long ago.